“Checking-in” is a growing social and commercial phenomenon that is based on, and may be considered to be, an emergent behavior of geolocation functionalities, which many of today's ubiquitous, smart, mobile communication devices provides. A smart, mobile communication device may for example be a smartphone, a personal digital assistant (PDA), a laptop, or a workbook, hereinafter referred to generically as “smartphones”. Geolocation refers to a real time physical location of a smartphone determined responsive to signals that are conveyed between the smartphone and a transmitter and/or a receiver having a known location. Geolocation may sometimes also refer to a location determined by an inertial navigator that dead reckons a path from a known location to determine a location of a smartphone. The term “geolocation” is also used to denote the process of determining the location responsive to the signals, and the verb “geolocate” and its inflections are used to denote performance of determining a location responsive to the signals. Checking-in, which developed in the wake of common availability of geolocation technology, refers to a person using a geolocation to inform others of his or her real time physical location.
A smartphone typically determines a geolocation by receiving and processing signals from satellites in the Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) system. A GPS enabled smartphone is capable of providing accurate locations as long as it has a clear line of sight to at least three satellites of the GPS system. If the smartphone has a clear line of sight to less than three GPS satellites, such as often occurs when a person bearing the smartphone is inside a building or on a city street bounded by high rise buildings, the smartphone cannot generally provide a reliable geolocation using only GPS technology that substantially agrees with an actual location. For such situations, the smartphone generally uses signals transmitted by a mobile telephone network to triangulate a geolocation for the smartphone. GPS assisted by information from a mobile telephone network is conventionally referred to as “assisted-GPS” (A-GPS).
Checking-in using a GPS or A-GPS geolocation provided by a smartphone is enabled by any of various application specific software (APP) packages that may be downloadable from the Internet. Among common check-in APPs are, for example, Foursquare®, Gowalla®, FaceBook Places®, Google Latitude®, and Brightkite®.
When a check-in APP in a person's smartphone is turned on, it displays on the smartphone's screen one or more venues in a neighborhood of a geolocation provided by the smartphone to which the person may check-in using the smartphone. A venue may, by way of example, be a restaurant, coffee shop, a store, a place of business, or a museum. The person typically checks-in to a particular venue displayed by the check-in APP after arriving at the venue by checking a suitable check box or by selecting a radio button associated with the venue in the smartphone display. After checking-in at a venue, the check-in APP may present the person with various options for adding information associated with being at the venue and/or for informing friends of his or her presence at the venue. A person typically informs others of a check-in and the check-in venue by posting an announcement on a social networking service such as, for example, Facebook Places®, Twitter®, or Linkedin®.
Businesses and organizations have recognized the potential commercial, promotional, and organizational advantages of using check-in services to interact with people in response to where they check-in, and have developed various ways of using “check-ins” to interface with their customers and associates. Retail stores offer incentives such as kickbacks, discounts, incentive points and badges, and real or virtual gifts, to people who frequently check-in at their stores. Coffee shops provide coffee cards to customers that may be debited for coffee when the customers check-in at the coffee shop. A coffee shop chain has even run a charity campaign responsive to checking-in, and committed to contribute to a charity for every check-in at a coffee shop in the chain. And various APPs for playing multiplayer geolocation games have been developed that are based on checking-in at different venues in a given geographical region.
Check-in services, and the businesses, organizations and activities that subscribe to and use the services, generally expect that a geolocation provided by a check-in APP that a person is running on his or her smartphone is an actual, real time location of the person at a time at which the person is checking-in. However, along with the development and spread of check-in services, methods and APPs for falsifying, referred to as “spoofing”, geolocations have become available. People may want to spoof their geolocations for amusement, cheating a system, or perpetrating a crime. The availability of geolocation spoofing may make checking-in unusable for various functions and procedures that may be sensitive to reliability of geolocations. Among such functions and procedures may be queuing, logging in presence at a work place, and offering valuable promotional discounts and prizes for check-ins.